Imagining Theology: Encounters with God in Scripture, Interpretation, and Aesthetics

By Garrett Green

The imagination is where the Creator chooses to meet his creatures, says renowned theologian Garrett Green. The Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit set the imagination free for genuine and creative knowledge of God, the world, others, and the self. Green explains that theology is best understood as human imagination faithfully conformed to the Bible as the paradigmatic key to the Christian gospel. He unpacks the implications of the imagination for a variety of theological issues, such as interpretation, aesthetics, eschatology, and the relationship between church and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781493422548

Garrett Green

Garrett Green (PhD, Yale University) is professor emeritus at Connecticut College, where he taught for four decades. He is the author of several books, including Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination and Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination, and he is the translator of Karl Barth on Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion. He gave the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham in 1998 while he was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Green has held research positions in Germany as a Fulbright and Humboldt scholar. He also served two terms as chair of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group of the American Academy of Religion and is active in the Society for the Study of Theology (UK), the Duodecim Theological Society, the New Haven Theological Discussion Group, and the Karl Barth Society of North America.

Book preview

© 2020 by Garrett Green

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-2254-8

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Figure 1 is based on the figure in J. Jastrow, The Mind’s Eye, Popular Science Monthly 54 (1899): 299–312.

To the inmates of the Church Inside the Walls at the Radgowski Correctional Institution, my companions on the Way

Remember those who are in prison,

as though in prison with them.

(Hebrews 13:3)

Contents

Cover    i

Half Title Page    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Dedication    v

Acknowledgments    ix

1. Toward a Normative Christian Imagination    1

Part 1:  Imagination and Theological Hermeneutics    23

2. Myth, History, and Imagination: The Creation Narratives in the Bible and Theology    25

3. Who’s Afraid of Ludwig Feuerbach? Suspicion and the Religious Imagination    43

4. The Crisis of Mainline Christianity and the Liberal Failure of Imagination    63

5. Hans Frei and the Hermeneutics of the Second Naïveté    73

Part 2:  Metaphor, Aesthetics, and Gender    93

6. The Mirror, the Lamp, and the Lens: On the Limits of Imagination    95

7. Barth on Beauty: The Ambivalence of Reformed Aesthetics    111

8. The Gender of God and the Theology of Metaphor    123

Part 3:  Modernity and Eschatology in Christian Imagination    143

9. The Adulthood of the Modern Age: Hamann’s Critique of Kantian Enlightenment    145

10. Kant as Christian Apologist: The Failure of Accommodationist Theology    161

11. Moltmann’s Two Eschatologies    179

12. The Eschatological Imagination    189

Part 4:  Theology of Religion and the Religions    205

13. The Myth of Religion: How to Think Christianly in a Secular World    207

14. Pluralism and the Religious Imagination    215

15. Imaginary Gods and the Anonymous Christ    237

Part 5: Conclusion    257

16. Christian Theology in a Post-Christian Age    259

Credits    269

Index    271

Cover Flaps    278

Back Cover    279

Acknowledgments

How does one acknowledge those who have provided support and inspiration throughout a whole career of teaching and writing theology? I could begin at the beginning with gratitude to my Doktorvater, Hans W. Frei, who remained a source of friendship, advice, and encouragement until his death in 1988. His legacy is evident in many places in this book, especially chapter 5. Or I could begin in the present with thanks to my editor at Baker Academic, R. David Nelson, who believed in this project from the outset and helped me mold and focus it into a real book. Without his insightful guidance, it might never have seen the light of day. Our mutual friend Joseph Mangina introduced us and has also supported me personally and academically over many years, through conversations, advice, and his own contributions to Christian theology. Two scholarly societies of which I am a member—the New Haven Theological Discussion Group and the Duodecim Theological Society—have provided me with ongoing opportunities to hear the work in progress of other scholars and on occasion to try out my own ideas before an audience of sympathetic experts.

Equally deserving of acknowledgment are others outside the world of academic theology. They include members of the various churches of which I have been a part, especially Crossroads Presbyterian Church and Bishop Seabury Anglican Church, as well as the incarcerated Christians to whom this book is dedicated. Without being aware of the help they were giving me, these fellow believers have kept my academic work grounded in the corporate worship and fellowship of the body of Christ.

Finally, at the most personal level, I must acknowledge the ongoing love and support of my wife, Priscilla, which has accompanied and undergirded all my work. She has also contributed concretely to this book (and everything else I have written) through her skillful editing of my prose, as only an experienced English teacher could have done, saving me from many a grammatical or stylistic stumble.

1

Toward a Normative Christian Imagination

Theologians have long been occupied with the question of how human beings can know God. Since the European Enlightenment, however, this question has assumed a new and more urgent form. For the Enlightenment inaugurated a radical change of worldview, beginning in seventeenth-century Europe and spreading eventually to the entire world. The factors leading to this change are many and complex,1 but one of the root causes—the one of greatest importance to Christian theology—was the advent of the new science, which has evolved into what today we call modern science. This new way of thinking about reality had its origin in the revolutionary astronomy of Copernicus (1473–1543), but its powerful impact on modern thinking was first felt as a result of the work of Galileo (1564–1642), who employed the new technology of the telescope to provide empirical proof of the Copernican system. By demonstrating that the mechanics of the heavens (the moons of Jupiter were his prime example) operate according to the same mathematically defined laws governing motion on the earth, he delivered a fatal blow to the Aristotelian-Christian worldview. This way of envisioning the world, as composed of concentric celestial spheres with the earth at its center, had dominated classical and Christian thought for two millennia. It is no accident that the opening battle in the modern war between science and religion was provoked by Galileo’s work. And the controversy has continued to this day: questions about science and religion still occasion widespread interest and heated debates among believers, skeptics, and the general public.

The worldview of the new science truly came of age with the epochal achievement of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1687. According to Newton’s system, the universe consists of an infinite expanse of space containing material bodies that move in accordance with universal laws that can be described in the language of mathematics, the lingua franca of modern science. This view of the world, unlike the one it replaced, is in principle fully accessible to the natural capabilities of human reason. The theological implication of this new worldview is epitomized in an exchange (perhaps apocryphal) between Napoleon and his former teacher, the mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. The emperor, having been told that Laplace’s book contained no mention of the Creator, asked him, Where is God in your system of the universe? Laplace is said to have answered, Sire, we have no need for that hypothesis. The scientific account, by offering an explanation of the world devoid of theological grounding, thereby called into question not only the authority of the church but the truth of Christianity itself.

The antithesis of science and religion runs like a scarlet thread through the history of modern thought from its origins in the new science of seventeenth-century Europe to the global secularism of the twenty-first century. It has captured the imagination of most of the technologically advanced societies of today and seems poised to overwhelm the remaining traditional backwaters that continue to resist its advance. The scare quotes around the two central terms call attention to the way in which our notions of both science and religion, especially in their perceived incompatibility, have been shaped—and distorted—by the very forces that drive the advance of modern culture. If Christian theology is to escape this intellectual and cultural deluge, it will be necessary to deconstruct and demystify the mythical story of how science has displaced religion as the privileged key to understanding the world today. Only as we are able to see how the advocates of each side have misunderstood both themselves and one another can we regain our cultural bearings and form a truer picture of how modernity has shaped our world. And only then can theology begin to correct the misperceptions of the past and chart a better path forward.

The Metaphysics of Modern Science

Two influential books that appeared late in the nineteenth century epitomize and chronicle the way in which people in the modern West have imagined a struggle between science and religion that has now raged for more than three centuries. John William Draper published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1874, and it was followed two decades later by Andrew Dickson White’s massive two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The assumption that such a conflict exists is deeply rooted in the imagination of modernity and is shared both by advocates of science and by those who defend religion. Even those who believe this warfare to be unfounded cannot ignore the battle that continues to rage around them. The issue that should concern us first of all is not who is right, or even whether the whole struggle is futile or unnecessary, but rather how our culture came to view things under this set of images in the first place. E. A. Burtt, author of the monumental study The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, maintains that the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world . . . is its most fundamental possession. Accordingly, he sets out to discover the cosmology underlying our mental processes by exposing the unexamined metaphysical assumptions bequeathed to modernity by the founders of modern science along with their revolutionary new empirical method of understanding the physical world.2 This new and unacknowledged metaphysics has achieved virtually universal acceptance in the modern world due especially to the authority accorded to Newton for his revolutionary scientific achievements. Modern philosophy, simply taking modern science for granted, has accepted uncritically the metaphysical assumptions of its founders along with their scientific method.3 Not only philosophers, however, have fallen into this unconscious error but modernity as a whole, including those religious thinkers who have engaged in an ongoing battle with science.

Burtt’s detailed demonstration of how these unexamined principles came to be presupposed in the modern world is a major scholarly accomplishment that has not been sufficiently acknowledged and taken into account by other interpreters of modern thought and culture over the past century—most especially by those who wrestle with the problem of science and religion. Burtt himself was concerned primarily with the way in which these metaphysical foundations have affected and distorted modern philosophy. What disturbs him most of all is the banishing of man from the great world of nature and his treatment as an effect of what happens in the latter.4 His complaint: Man begins to appear for the first time in the history of thought as an irrelevant spectator and insignificant effect of the great mathematical system which is the substance of reality.5 But this displacement of humanity in the modern era is the consequence of a more fundamental shift in the metaphysics of modernity—namely, the displacement of God. The diction in Laplace’s response to Napoleon is a dead giveaway: we modern scientists, he says, have no need for that hypothesis. How did the God of the Bible, the God worshiped by Jews and Christians, become the God-hypothesis? At least one seventeenth-century European, Blaise Pascal (1623–62), recognized the immense difference between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers—by which he surely meant those modern philosophers who have adopted the implicit metaphysics of modern science.

The misunderstanding of science by both sides in the science and religion debate is rooted in what we might call the teleological amnesia of modern science. The revolution in science initiated by Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and their peers is rooted in a methodological innovation first articulated by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620) and taken for granted in all subsequent science. Explicitly departing from Aristotle’s fourfold account of causality that had been the standard teaching for centuries, Bacon proposes a new experimental empiricism based entirely on efficient causality. In other words, the modern scientist explains the phenomena of nature inductively by attending to the immediately preceding conditions. Doing science this way, however, means ignoring what Aristotle calls final causes—that is, questions of end or ultimate purpose. The modern scientist thus excludes all teleological considerations in order to describe how things move and change in the present, how they come about in the light of the preceding conditions. By bracketing consideration of the end or purpose of things (the why question), they are able to observe and test the immediate causes of natural phenomena (the how question)—and thus to gain greater control over them. The importance of this last point—control—which Bacon emphasizes, can be seen in the stupendous technological advances that have flowed from the findings of modern science. What has happened, however, is that our culture, including many of its influential philosophical and religious leaders, has forgotten that the bracketing of teleology by scientists was a methodological choice, a presupposition of scientific method, not a conclusion induced from observation of natural phenomena. Having forgotten that questions of purpose and ultimate meaning had been deliberately set aside, people now imagine that science has discovered that nature is devoid of purpose. This teleological amnesia has encouraged the widespread modern notion that science has proven the beliefs of religion to be mistaken or implausible since the natural world is devoid of purpose and is guided by no ultimate end. What has really happened is that a particular scientific method has been mistaken for a metaphysics. The fact that this transformation has mostly occurred unintentionally, even unconsciously, makes it all the more difficult to perceive and to criticize. Through a meticulous examination of the writings of the founders of modern science, Burtt shows how the transformation from method to metaphysics began in the thinking of Galileo, Descartes, and others in the seventeenth century—especially Newton—and came to shape the whole of modern thought and culture.

The Religious Misunderstanding of Science

The same misreading of science that seduced philosophers into uncritically adopting the metaphysical assumptions of the architects of early modern science has not been confined to the field of philosophy. Precisely because the underlying sources of confusion were unrecognized even by scientists themselves, the new metaphysics has transformed the thinking of nearly every modern person, including those religious thinkers who set out to defend the Christian faith. The abandonment of teleological explanations in favor of efficient causality in science has encouraged religious apologists to try to defend religion on the same assumption—that is, without recourse to teleological considerations. With final causality gone, Burtt summarizes, the only way to keep [God] in the universe was to . . . regard him as the First Efficient Cause, thus leaving behind the understanding of God as Supreme Good.6 Christian apologists who start down this road today can scarcely avoid arriving at the deism championed by so many of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. These well-meaning apologists have unwittingly adopted the metaphysics of modern science without realizing that in doing so they have reduced God to the First Efficient Cause of the world while claiming that they are justifying belief in the Holy One of the Bible. Looking for empirical evidence of God, they fail to see that they are treating God as an explanatory hypothesis, one of the contingent objects of the world (even if called the Supreme Being) that may or may not exist. If they were to be successful in their arguments, they would find that what they had proved was not God but an idol.

The warfare between science and religion has reached a stalemate because both have been wrongly conceived. A lasting truce will require a demythologizing of both terms. A good place to begin is with a suggestion that Burtt makes about how a scientific method came to be misunderstood as a metaphysical discovery in the first place. He suggests that it resulted from a misapplication, to the universe at large, of a point of view legitimate enough in a certain field, an error arising from the unwarranted assumption that because man . . . can know and use portions of his world, some ultimate and permanent difference is thereby made in that world.7 A proper apologetic strategy for religious believers must begin by acknowledging that empirical science is not equipped to tell us the ultimate nature of reality but is rather a means to better understand the workings of the natural world by bracketing ultimate questions in order to investigate and gain control over its immanent mechanisms. The founders of modern science were surely correct in blaming medieval thinkers for confusing theological principles with empirical accounts of nature. But they and their modern successors have made a similar error by absolutizing their empirical methodology to arrive at conclusions that exceed the legitimate capabilities of science, becoming in effect metaphysical assumptions that carry theological implications. What is needed today is a more modest understanding of the limits of empirical science, together with a better way of distinguishing the realm in which it does its proper work from the realm appropriate to metaphysics and theology.

Imagination in Science and Theology

The most important change in our understanding of science since the founding of modern science occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century. Anyone wishing to think seriously about science today must take into account Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.8 Kuhn proved that many of our common assumptions about how science works—notions that have gained virtually universal consensus in the modern era—are mistaken. Through a close examination of the history of science, he shows how actual scientific work proceeds much differently from the common assumption that scientists simply observe nature objectively in order to gather facts that are then verified by experiment and added cumulatively to our store of knowledge about the natural world. His most important contribution is the concept of paradigm, which identifies the analogical exemplar of the whole that underlies every particular scientific enterprise. Kuhn draws on the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who used the figure of the duck-rabbit9 to show how the recognition of parts depends on prior apprehension of a whole, the constitutive pattern by which the separate parts can be recognized as such (fig. 1). Wittgenstein’s philosophical insight was derived from the work of Gestalt psychologists, who showed why one person viewing an object can see something quite different from another viewer (e.g., one sees a duck where another sees a rabbit). Such examples show how even objective observation is dependent on an implicit grasp of the holistic paradigm that governs what kind of object the observer observes.

Kuhn has brought to light the essential role played by imagination in science. The importance of paradigms throughout the history of science demonstrates the necessary contribution of imagination to the ongoing work of science. Most of the time scientific research proceeds without an explicit awareness of the paradigms it presupposes; Kuhn calls this phase normal science, which consists mainly of puzzle-solving.10 Contrary to the commonly held view of science, however, scientists do not simply discard their working hypotheses when experiments fail to verify them. Instead, they continue to pursue their research in spite of experimental anomalies. Eventually, however, the pressure of anomaly—a phenomenon . . . for which his paradigm had not readied the investigator11—may lead to a crisis in the normal practice of science, in which the paradigm that has hitherto given shape and direction to scientific research appears to falter. What happens next is unpredictable. Scientists may succeed in overcoming the apparent dilemmas by correcting errors in their previous work or refining existing theories. But it may also happen that some new and unorthodox way of doing science appears on the scene and succeeds in attracting scientists to a new way of thinking on the basis of a quite different paradigm. This event is the scientific revolution of Kuhn’s title—such as the famous examples of the adoption of Copernican astronomy in the seventeenth century and the transformation from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics in the twentieth century. Not all paradigm changes in science are as dramatic as these, but such transformations have occurred and will continue to occur, though often so gradually that the participants may be unaware of them at the time. It is nevertheless the case that all scientific research takes place under the influence of specific paradigms. Following Wittgenstein, Kuhn appeals to the work of Gestalt psychologists, whose experiments have shown that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself.12 In the same way that we remain unaware of our seeing paradigmatically until we encounter something akin to the duck-rabbit figure, so scientists may proceed without awareness of the implicit paradigms guiding their research until, say, a series of anomalous experiments calls into question their basic assumptions. Such crises have occurred repeatedly throughout the history of science. Whether in visual perception, scientific work, or religious experience, people remain unaware of the paradigmatic commitments underlying their thinking until some crisis, some breakdown of normal experience, gives birth to a new way of seeing.

This dramatic change in our understanding of how science actually works ought to transform the way we view the problem of science and religion. The key element is the recognition of the role played by imagination in both. For the first time since the advent of modern science we catch a glimpse of something similar in the work of the natural scientist and the theologian: the essential role of paradigmatic imagination for both enterprises. It is not the case, of course, that this similarity dissolves the real differences between them. On the contrary, recognition of the essential role played by imagination in both scientific and theological thought puts us in a better position to grasp the real differences between them, and to see why the long-standing notion of their warfare is an illusion produced by an inadequate understanding of both.

Let us begin by acknowledging the qualitative difference between knowing the things of this world and knowing those aspects of reality that transcend our cognitive abilities. That such a distinction exists can be illustrated by an everyday analogy. Try to imagine a dog’s conception of human beings; let’s call it canine anthropology.13 Anyone who has spent time communicating with dogs has learned that they do in fact have knowledge of humans: they can recognize the difference between humans and other animals, and between one human and another; they are able to communicate to us at least some of their needs and desires; we can teach them to obey certain spoken commands—and so on. Yet their canine anthropology does not begin to approach human reality as we know it. And no amount of training or education could ever enable a dog to achieve the kind of knowledge we possess about our own species. Now compare this canine epistemological quandary to the situation of human theology. Our creaturely attempts to know God confront us with a comparable but far greater quandary—not the watered-down, domesticated God of modern deism and religious apologetics, but the biblical God, the Holy One of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ, the God of the church fathers, of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, Luther and Calvin, and of myriad ordinary believers throughout the ages.

The difference between the two kinds of knowledge sought by theologians and empirical scientists is not simply quantitative but qualitative, for my desire to know God is vastly more complex and problematic than the efforts of my dog (a fellow creature) to know me. There are many ways in which the immeasurable difference between knowing the natural world around us and knowing its Creator, Sustainer, and End has been expressed: the difference between time and eternity, earth and heaven, creature and Creator, imminence and transcendence, contingency and necessity, this world and the world to come. The apostle Paul puts it like this: For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known (1 Cor. 13:12). St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes our knowledge of being from our knowledge of Being-Itself, who is God. Theologian Katherine Sonderegger, employing another term from scholastic theology, speaks of the divine aseity, God’s Reality a se, in himself and not simply as known from the standpoint of the created world.14 She puts her finger squarely on the central error of modernist theology, one that has prevented it from doing justice to the divine aseity: the importation and concentration of causality into Divine Power, which forces Divine Will off the stage. In this way God’s freedom has been hopelessly compromised by the notion of Absolute Cause, an efficient Power that can brook no rival. She sees this error epitomized in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who has recognized the full collapse and reduction of causality in the modern age into efficient cause, and has embraced it with radical confidence.15 Here, in the theologian who has had so great an influence on Protestant theology over the past two centuries, we see the consequences of adopting the metaphysical foundations of empirical science into our theology. By trying to conceive God according to the metaphysics of efficient causality, theologians have fundamentally misunderstood the radical difference between the biblical God and the things of this imminent and contingent world. Theology cannot import its metaphysics or its methods from the sciences without distorting its vision of God, the proper object of theology, as its very name implies. The task of the scientist is to imagine the natural world, but the task of imagining God is something altogether different.

There has been, and still is, great resistance on both sides to the claim that imagination is centrally implicated in both natural science and theology. The reason is clear: people commonly assume that what we imagine must be imaginary. This notion, however, is manifestly false. The human imagination serves various purposes that may be distinguished into two broad groups on the basis of its use. On the one hand, imagination can be employed in fictive or fantastic ways for a variety of purposes, including the literary and aesthetic. But the fictive imagination also has its darker uses, ranging from misrepresentation (whether intentional or unintentional) to deliberate deceit. On the other hand, imagination can be employed realistically, in the service of truth. Even at the level of simple visual perception, the realistic imagination works to focus and supplement the data that our eyes take in directly. (I can’t see the other side of the cup into which I am pouring my coffee, but I am willing to trust my imagination that it isn’t missing or full of holes.) The realistic imagination functions throughout human experience, enabling us to envision the whole of things, to focus our minds to perceive how things are ordered and organized—in other words, it allows us to see what is really there, rather than just a blooming, buzzing confusion. This is the kind of imagination employed by scientists and theologians alike. Of course, the realistic imagination is not infallible and sometimes misleads us. And as already noted, imagination can be deliberately employed to produce unreal, imaginary outcomes, whether for good or for ill. So it isn’t really surprising that many scientists and many religious believers resist the thesis that imagination plays a crucial role in their respective enterprises.

One way to reduce that resistance is to pay close attention to how imagination actually functions realistically in both areas. Philosophers of science have made great strides in the past half century toward that goal in their own field of inquiry. A corresponding account of religious imagination must begin by acknowledging just how different the object of theology is from the objects of empirical science. Accordingly, the theologian and the scientist have very different relationships to their respective objects of study. That difference is concisely expressed in a German term that—regrettably for Anglophones—requires a more complicated explanation in English. We can say, using the German term, that God is unverfügbar and that whatever the theologian says about God must therefore take into account God’s Unverfügbarkeit. The straightforward translation of the verb verfügen is to dispose, implying that verfügbar means disposable. Unfortunately this word has a wide range of meanings in English (are we talking about diapers, perhaps, or beverage containers?), and the theologically significant meaning is rare in current English usage.16 The definition of the verb dispose that comes closest to the German verfügen reads as follows: To make arrangements; to determine or control the course of affairs or events; to ordain, appoint, as in the proverbial expression Man proposes, but God disposes.17 The best way to express the meaning of God’s Unverfügbarkeit in contemporary English is to say that God is not at our disposal. Unlike the natural phenomena that the scientist studies (which are verfügbar, at our disposal), God cannot be brought under our control, is not subject to our manipulation. We cannot bring God into the laboratory in order to subject him to experimental analysis or search for evidence of his existence in the natural world. Such methods would ignore the sovereign freedom of God, what Sonderegger calls God’s aseity, the essential attribute of his nature.18

Even though paradigmatic imagination is a necessary component of both empirical science and theology, the vast qualitative differences between their objects of inquiry require them to deploy that imagination very differently. But since both of them understand their use of imagination to be realistic—a means of gaining a better understanding of reality, rather than an exercise in fiction or fantasy—both of them must wrestle with the question of how to govern the use of imagination, how to employ it properly in the service of truth. One reason for the widespread suspicion of imagination, whether in science or religion, is that imagination can be used to serve many different masters, to achieve many different ends. It is, of course, possible to misimagine reality while seeking to understand it, and some people even appeal to imagination deceitfully, seeking through false analogy or other means to deceive others. What the legitimate seeker after truth needs, therefore, is a way to identify the normative use of imagination, some set of rules or guidelines to govern its use and to curb its excesses. The remainder of this chapter will sketch out some of those guidelines for Christian theology.

Normative Imagination in Christian Theology

The first rule for the normative use of theological imagination in Christianity is foundational and underlies all the others:

1. The Bible embodies the concrete paradigm on which all genuine Christian theology is based, enabling the faithful to rightly imagine God.

Christians have affirmed from the earliest times that our knowledge of God is grounded in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Christian theology is thus a hermeneutical discipline, one that necessarily involves interpretation of a foundational text. But that way of putting things disguises the complexity of the task, for it would be more precise to say that theology requires the interpretation of many texts, since the Bible is a collection of sixty-six (or so) writings over many centuries by authors known and unknown, some of which incorporate materials from earlier texts or oral traditions. So before even starting to interpret the Bible, theologians must wrestle with the definition of the biblical canon itself, a task that led to more than three centuries of often contentious debate in the early history of the church and is not a wholly settled matter even today. But the task of defining a canon already is interpretation, since it requires us to decide what qualifies a text to be considered canonical.

The principle at stake in this case is the Christian teaching that the Bible is the Word of God, which implies that Christians understand Scripture to be the place where God speaks to us. Everything depends, however, on how we imagine that communication to take place. One popular but wholly inadequate approach is to claim that Scripture contains the Words (plural!) of God—a teaching that would bring Christian reading of the Bible close to the way Islam reads the Qur’an. This doctrine is often called by the misleading term literalism but is more accurately labeled the theory of divine dictation. It has led to the modern heresy of creationism, a particularly contentious theory that has shaken the faith of many conscientious but uninformed believers and led critics to accuse the church of being the enemy of science. Sonderegger offers a devastating critique of this popular heresy. "Were Christians to teach a doctrine of inspiration that truly and directly taught divine dictation, she writes, the Divine would be understood to destroy the human through its own manifestation. The human mind would be annihilated, replaced by the Divine Word, a searing and molten Presence that extinguished all creaturely thought and word."19 Though motivated by the pious intent